Did you catch these?

Category: aging

Journal entry. March 20th. First day of spring. Lower mainland, B.C. Good day, diary. Good day, Lord. And good day, Spring. After our record-breaking cold Canadian winter, you’re more welcome than usual, even though you’re late to your own party. I travelled two provinces in order to catch your entry …

On March 13, 2019, my mother would have turned a hundred. After her death at age ninety-five, I lost her voice for almost four years. It neither echoed in my ears nor whispered in the corridors of memory. That grieved me. Then came the dream that placed life precisely as …

God knows I’m grateful for all his blessings. For Jesus and home and country. Faith and family and friends. But this Thanksgiving column has somehow gotten paw prints all over it. It’s done. The months of searching. Praying. Wondering if we could, if we should, if God and GraceCat and …

The Preacher and I travelled a thousand summer miles between Dad’s home and ours recently. We took a bed and breakfast a mile or so down the road from his care facility and visited daily between naps and meals. We played checkers for an hour one afternoon, he and I. …

Today’s itinerary stretches between our son’s place in B.C.’s Kootenay region and my father’s residential care facility in Abbotsford. We set out on Highway #95, the two-lane road connecting Invermere and Golden, B.C. – one of my favourite sections of that route. Under blue sky and dumpling clouds, we motor through vast …

My 93 year-old father says he visits with his twin brother,, Dave, regularly in the woodshop. I picture them there, alike as two halves of a walnut. Surrounded by their projects, chatting and laughing over the buzz of saws, breathing in the sweet fragrance of sawdust and stopping often to clean …

I’ll call my ninety-three year old dad on Father’s Day. He’ll call me “Sweetheart” and tell me how much he loves me. And once again, he’ll cry and thank me for making the time. “I love talking to you, Dad,” I say. And I do. I try to call every …

It rips you in half, sometimes, the agony and ecstasy of marriage, and it hurts. That’s what happens when God joins two people. You become one. So the big separations, the thorny differences in things like opinion and intent, practice and preference, well…working those out, even after decades, takes prayer, …

For most of my adult years, I’ve kept my stick-straight hair fairly short. But before having children, it reached halfway down my back. When our first baby began using it for a pull toy and teether, I paid my hairdresser a visit and a few dollars. Back home, my husband …

Something happens on one’s inside when the season of grandparenting arrives. (Something happens on one’s outside too, but that’s a subject for another column.) In the classic children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, a stuffed toy rabbit, who had observed real live rabbits playing in the garden, asks a …